


neutrons

by Frektane



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:39:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frektane/pseuds/Frektane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s born Alexandra Kaidonovskya with hair the colour of the sun, and by the time the first kaiju makes landfall she has scars on her knuckles and a bump on the ridge of her nose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	neutrons

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She’s born Alexandra Kaidonovskya with hair the colour of the sun, and by the time the first kaiju makes landfall she has scars on her knuckles and a bump on the ridge of her nose.

The first time someone tries to take advantage of her, she kicks his knees in and breaks three of her fingers pummelling him in the face. She is sixteen, never taught not to fight, with muscles wrapped around her bones like wires drawn taut against the burdens of her family; they are dead poor with too many children to keep fed, so she gets a forged ID and a pair of boots and is a prison guard at seventeen.

They spit at her and taunt her through the bars the first few times she’s on shift, all leering eyes and cracking knuckles, and she cracks heads instead until it’s not respect but something resembling it, harsh and grumbling. She expected respect, demanded it, in menace and a gun prominently displayed on her hip—and, later, in lipstick bright red like the colour of fresh blood.

She lives where she works, rarely sees the sun, and sends all her money home to her family. It’s not love so much as it is obligation, she thinks, kneeling on the back of an unruly inmate with her full five foot ten bulk leveraged into his spine. Later, when her family cuts off contact, she makes no attempt to find them again. She never wanted to make them proud, anyways. Her loyalty doesn’t lie with them, it lies with her country.

Several years on, when the first kaiju comes through the breach, she watches the news report with her face an impassive mask. Around her, fellow guards and officers quake and blanch, these violent men reduced to shaking at the sight of something they couldn’t subdue with force. Two years later, when the first Jaeger kill occurs, the men cheer but she is silent.

She’s transferred to a different facility at twenty-four. This time, it’s maximum security and the inmates are dangerous, sullen, unwilling to respect a woman with a gun and a baton. After a week, she snaps and puts two of them in the hospital, earning herself an order to her overseer’s office. When the recruiters step into the room, she doesn’t stand or acknowledge them, and they know they’ve found a candidate.

Her first night in the Shatterdome is spent bleaching her hair the colour of ash.

Her fiftieth is spent in a rhythm, musical. The cracks of the staves and the sound of heavy breathing is a soundtrack to match the blood roaring in her ears, and she glares Alexander Strelnikov down with a ferocity that he matches exactly. His eyes are grey to her green, challenging, sharp. They carry a bite in them that she instinctively likes.

Seven years later, they carry only panic, and Sasha Kaidonovskya makes eye contact with Aleksis Kaidonovsky across a wall of rushing seawater. She can feel him clawing desperately in her mind, panicked like a wild animal, and she rages against the water with the force of a storm, trying to protect him, to get Cherno to stand, to, to—

When Leatherback brings its claws down, she’s still fighting, and she dies first. In some ways, that’s almost a blessing.


End file.
